All sports can make you miserable, but only Test cricket creates real suffering. England had a day of suffering yesterday — over after over of impotence, frustration and misery. In all other sports you know it will be over soon; in a Test match, you know it never is. Certainly not when Australia are batting on a Welsh pudding of a wicket and the ball is doing nothing in the air.

We were all keyed up to see an England team with two spinners bowling on a pitch with real turn, but the home side couldn’t do it Swann’s way and at the other end we had only the half Monty. The Australia batsmen garnered runs with efficiency and England’s prospects looked fractionally more dismal with every ball.

Andrew Strauss, the England captain, looked like Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter books, trying the spell to open doors, but finding them for ever locked, no matter how he waved his wand or uttered the magic word: “Alohomora!” He tried with all his bowlers in turn, but hardly a door did he open all day.

The day assumed the texture of one of those frustrating dreams, in which you are on your way to an important exam but you can’t find the room, and even if you do, you haven’t read the books. All these wonderful bowlers, all five of them, and the spinners coming in two by two. But every step that Strauss took, the destination got farther away.

In the end he got Paul Collingwood to bowl. It’s when you turn to bowler No 6 that you make it plain to the world that you are not waving but drowning. All those magic bowlers and none of them able to deliver a decent spell.

Ou sont les Monties d’antan as well? There have been days when Monty Panesar has performed wonders, enchanted days when nothing could go go wrong. But now scarcely anything he tries seems to work. Strauss and Panesar found themselves in the pages of those darker, later books in the Harry Potter series.

It is tempting to blame everybody who had a bowl yesterday, all five or even six of them, and double blame for the spinners who made the ball turn all right, but couldn’t use the turn to take a hatful of wickets. After all, the alternative is to heap praise on the Australia batsmen — who really were rather good — but where’s the fun in that? The snag, however, is that the England bowlers really didn’t bowl all that badly. They were just outplayed by the Australia batsmen, and that is not a disgrace.

It’s a hell of a disappointment, but not a disgrace.

Everybody has been telling us that the pitch will eventually explode and give us some explosive cricket as a result. Perhaps they are right, but there is no sign of that happening so far. The turn, sometimes lavish but generally pretty slow, was negotiated by one man in a green helmet after another; sometimes well, sometimes brilliantly.

Panesar has just about completed his spell as national teddy-bear. His naivety no longer charms quite as it did. Age has withered him. Custom has staled his infinite variety, not that he ever had infinite variety. Indeed, he has repeatedly put his poor form this season down to a belated and misguided attempt to acquire even a finite variety.

But he has given up this search, given up his hunt for the Holy Grail, or the doosra. Now it’s time for something completely the same. But the old Monty always had that touch of magic about him; the new Monty, especially on this wicket, was just a decent chap doing his best. There was something of the busted flush about Panesar yesterday. Mind you, he did get the wicket of Ricky Ponting, and for a mere 150, too.

Nor do I mean that entirely unkindly; Ponting looked as if he was going to bat for ever. Panesar bowled him off an inside edge, so the spinner was a shade lucky, but all athletes, bowlers in particular, need to be given a little credit for getting lucky.

Panesar is a man diminished. He was powered for a time by the belief that everything would be made all right, but now that has gone from him. Nor does he seem to have much else. Meanwhile, Graeme Swann, now England’s first choice as spinner, simply couldn’t get it right, and that made for suffering all round.

It is not a moral failing to be outplayed . . . but it is even more painful than just messing it up. The real cause of this suffering wasn’t that England could have done better, it was the fact that they probably couldn’t.